About the collection
The collection of material and archival documents of the Department of Ethnographic has accumulated about 35,000 works of art, 60,000 photographs and 1,800 archival items over the past hundred years.
The first turning point in the fate of the Ethnographic Collection was in 1907. The National Exhibition and Fair of Pécs opened at that time, where an Orman room, a kitchen and farm buildings, as well as the folk costumes of the area were presented. After the demolition of the exhibition the objects were placed in the Ethnographic Collection of the City Museum.
The Baranya County Museum also had a significant ethnographic collection: Igaz Lajos carried out ethnographic collections in Baranya in the early 1930s, this material became the basic collection unit of the County Museum which was established in 1938.
The third important set of objects of the Ethnographic Department is a part of the ethnographic collection of objects collected by the Zsolnay sisters, Júlia and Teréz, from the 1870s. The Zsolnay sisters collected mainly in the vicinity of Pécs, but the collection also includes ceramics from Transylvania and the Highlands. The collection of Teréz and Júlia Zsolnay was inspired not only by the interest in peasant objects in the mid-1870s but also by practical reasons: the motifs of ethnographic objects were used in the creation of the ceramic plans of the Zsolnay factory. The Janus Pannonius Museum preserves more than ten thousand textiles and about one hundred and fifty ceramic objects from the early stages of ethnographic collecting.